Equal overtime rules could save lives

Sarah B. Horton

As we savor our fresh asparagus and artichokes this spring, let’s make a change that the legendary farmworker advocate Cesar Chavez would have championed — paying overtime for the people who help feed us.

Paying overtime for farmworkers would be a step toward economic security for hundreds of thousands of people. But it would also help protect farmworkers’ health and save lives, by preventing heat illness.

There is currently a state bill to do just that. The “Phase-In Overtime Act,” proposed by Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego), would bring overtime requirements in line with those for other California workers over the next four years.

It’s an important step in dismantling the long history of making exceptions for agriculture, exempting farm owners from the labor protections that bind employers in other industries. In 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act established a minimum wage and time-and-a-half overtime pay, but excepted farm (and domestic) workers. Bowing to growers’ demands and fears of a food crisis, President Roosevelt excluded these vulnerable workers from standard protections.

Today, California is one of only seven states that mandate any sort of overtime pay for farmworkers. In 1976, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill that established the rules still in effect today — that farmworkers receive time-and-a-half overtime pay once they’ve worked in excess of 10 hours a day, 60 hours a week.

This double standard in overtime helps explain why farmworkers remain the lowest paid of all wage and salaried workers. Because farmworkers are employed seasonally, for short bursts of time, equitable overtime pay could help compensate for farmworkers’ erratic earnings.

Just as importantly, the overtime bill would complement California’s heat illness protection law, keeping the state at the vanguard of work safety.

In July 2005, California became the first state in the nation to implement rules protecting outdoor workers against heat illness, mandating that employers provide workers with shade, water and rest “when they required it.”

That summer, 10 workers died at work from the heat — four in farm work. A quick glance at their cases reveals the importance of overwork in their deaths. On July 13, Salud Zamudio Rodríguez collapsed five minutes before the end of a shift picking bell peppers on a 105-degree day. On July 21, Agustin Gudino died while working a 10-hour shift picking grapes in 108-degree weather. The previous July, Asunción Valdivia died after a 10-hour shift picking grapes.

The state strengthened its heat illness regulations in February 2015. Now farm employers must provide enough shade to accommodate all workers at any time, water as close to workers “as practicable,” and implement a mandatory 10-minute “cool-down” period every two hours once the heat rises above 95 degrees.

But heat deaths cannot be averted through “rest, shade and water” alone. Laws that render workers less vulnerable — by providing them with additional pay or a social safety net — are guaranteed to have an important effect on heat illness as well.

Giving overtime pay to farmworkers is not only a matter of pay equity, but also of work safety. A quick visit to a field site in Mendota, the “Cantaloupe Center of the World,” helps explain why. Farmworkers there routinely work 50-70 hour weeks during the summer harvest season to clear the fields of melon. The hotter the sun, the more quickly the melons ripen, and therefore the faster the pace of work. Excessive work, especially in high heat, can lead to injury and illness. Overtime pay is a necessary deterrent to overwork, helping reduce the long hours that farmworkers are forced to spend in the sun.

Horton is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado, Denver, and author of the book, “They Leave Their Kidneys in the Fields: Illness, Injury, and “Illegality” among U.S. Farmworkers,” to be published by the University of California Press in June.